Astute update watchers may have noticed an upgrade to the 3.3.4 ffmpeg and libav* libraries shipped with MX 17/18 come down the pipe into main. This turned out to be necessary because of our newly upgraded libva* libraries (va-api hardware decoding and encoding, mainly for Intel GPUs) required that ffmpeg needed to be rebuilt against them instead of the stock Stretch versions; otherwise va-api was broken.

I also fixed the ffmpeg 4.0.3 in MX 17 testing the same way. I've found that QMPlay2 is the easiest program to test if va-api hardware decoding is working on your machine; just switch between the FFMpeg decoder and FFMpeg VA-API decoder at the top of the Decoders Priority in Playback Settings, and try and play some 4K video, like the Elysium movie trailer. (Intel GPU users need to install i965-va-driver, also just updated to support newer hardware; maybe we should include this on the ISO) CPU use can then be monitored in Conky or in "top", among many other options.

4.1 is now in the test repo. Remember that you have to disable "hide libs and dev packages" in the MX Package installer if you want libavcodec-extra to be available, which may allow va-api hardware encoding to work (needs testing).